writing

What, When You Get Right Down to It, Is a Soul?

jacob3 Comments

‘Tis the witching hour. And I’m going to think out loud here, as input would be most welcome.

One of the things I’m always cognizant of when I’m world-building is influences. I was, alas, raised in a culture that’s heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian ideas, and while I appreciate some of same, I don’t want knee-jerk assumptions creeping into my fiction. I read far too much stuff wherein the author just plucked the low-hanging fruit and didn’t think outside of the culture they’re immersed in. You’ll see some poorly-incorporated elements from “exotic” cultures thrown in any-old-how, just for the sake of appearing different. But when you pick at the surface, you realize it’s all gilt.

The more I scratch at my writing, the more gilt I find. It would be nice if I could just scrape it off and rebuild from the bottom-up, but we’re talking core concepts. I won’t be telling the stories I want to tell if I remove all the gilt. So the problem becomes, how do I turn it solid gold?

Take souls, for example.

The major concept in my series, the foundation upon which the rest of the edifice is built, is the Ahc’ton K’san Torveneh: Souls Who Travel. For years, I just took it for granted that these folks were unique souls who get reborn over and over in service to their people.

But that’s mere gilt. That’s assuming a soul. Even with the little bit of gloss a physicist friend added – the concept of the soul as an other-dimensional entity with a propensity for attaching itself to biological forms in this dimension – it’s still just gilt. I never really questioned it before now, but having embraced my atheism and hanging about with science buffs and proud atheists, I’m certainly questioning it now.

And the question is fascinating. What, in fact, do Atheseans mean when they refer to a “soul”?

I can tell you straight up they don’t mean anything religious. The soul isn’t something as solid as a body, and you can’t extract a soul from a body and study it (that I know of – who knows what these buggers will get up to as I explore this question?). But it has a physical reality. It has nothing to do with religion, any more than electricity does. Because it’s so hard to grasp, directly perceive, it’s easy to put it down to something spiritual, but it’s a really real thing with an objective existence.

The Ahc’ton are special because their souls are reborn with identity intact. That’s the whole point of being Ahc’ton: to remember who you were, carry all of the accumulated knowledge of lifetimes with you and put it to good use in new lives among alien species. No other souls travel this way. The soul as a distinct identity ceases to exist once a person dies. If we’re talking an other-dimensional entity, it basically loses the “I” it became when it was attached to the physical body. There’s no eternal life, no consciousness beyond death – except for the Ahc’ton.

So that’s the challenge of the week. I have to go beyond my assumptions, peel off the gilt, and really get into the meat of this thing. If the soul is not something religious or spiritual, what is it? Why does it have this propensity for attaching to a brain? How did the Ahc’ton’s souls end up being discrete entitities with an identity they’ve carried for millennia, when everybody else’s soul goes back to being an undifferentiated something?

It would be so much easier if I could just take the religious view and be done with it, but it’s so much more fun to struggle with the concept of something material, objective, and so far beyond our current science that it just looks like a miracle.

There ye go. Speculate at will, my wise and wonderful darlings.

What, When You Get Right Down to It, Is a Soul?
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What It's All About, Really, When You Get Right Down to It

jacob

Most importantly: a profound muchos gracias to those who have volunteered to become my Wise Readers. You’ll forever hold a high place in my personal pantheon. And there’s still room, so by all means, volunteer if you haven’t already.

Writing is one of the hardest things a person can do. It’s easier when we’re not going it alone. That’s by way of saying, my services are available to those who need the favor returned.

It’s now Night Three of my get-back-in-the-saddle attempt, and it’s hard getting those feet in the stirrups. I’ve always been a cyclical writer – I go through months of profuse creativity, followed by many more months of wasteland. Unfortunately, the wasteland encroaches further with every passing year.

That’s why I turned to blogging. On the nights when I’m singularly uninspired, when writer’s block is more like writer’s insurmountable obstacle, it’s still simple enough to find a bit of news somewhere and riff on it. It’s writing, of a sort. It’s useful writing, even: I’ve met some incredible people, we’ve got the start of something brilliant in this Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, and I don’t doubt I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life.

But my passion and focus has always been on the fiction. Even when I’m not actively writing, I’m always thinking about it. It’s pervaded every aspect of my life. Every decision I make, every book I read, every interest I have, all of them can be traced back to the series I’ve been working on for decades.

Bush pushed me to take my politics public, but I was studying politics long before he pissed me off, because worlds will have governments. I’m not the kind of writer who can do it half-way: I’ve got to understand the basis of things so that my characters live in a world that developed from their perspective, not one that’s just a generic template. That’s one of the reasons it’s taken so long to build the universe I write in, and why the work continues. It takes a lot of effort, and you have to know a lot of things, to write this way.

Take maps. Most fantasy writers I know draw a continent or two, slap on a few mountains, squiggle a few rivers, and call it good. What do I do? I spend years studying physical geography, plate tectonics and other branches of geology, and I buy a $200 Wacom Tablet so I can draw the world in exquisite detail. Not that I’ve put the whole thing together yet, not by half, but I’ve got a really nifty island:


My darlings, meet Cariicedraas. Someday, I’ll take you on the full tour. I know everything there is to know about its market district.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve got Unicorns. I do. Only they’re not called Unicorns: they’re Drusavs, and they’ve got their own evolutionary history (of sorts), their own language, culture, philosophy, foibles, and history. One of the stories you Wise Readers will get to read is from their very ancient history, when two poets got into a war with each other, and ended up unifying the world. And it’s bloody hard to write, because Drusav poetry is physical. Equines have a rich body language. It’s taken a lot of thinking to extrapolate from what we understand of how horses think and speak, and determine what sentient, highly intelligent equines with a bloody great horn growing out of their foreheads would have done with that rudimentary language.

Besides, I’m not what you might call the world’s greatest poet. Nahkorah and Disahnahle were. Pressure’s on. At least, since their poetry was a physical language, I can put down any weakness in the poetry to something lost in translation. Useful, that.

Right now, the story I’m struggling with revolves around what it means for the immortal to give up immortality, subject themselves to repeated rounds of birth and death in service to their people. I’m aided in this by Buddhist philosophy and the concept of samsara, but it’s not enough. I also have to figure out just what they mean by a “soul.” I can tell you this: t’ain’t what the theologians think.

Times like this do make me think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. But the most important words ever spoken to me were these:

Do them justice.

Garrett said that to me many years ago, in the fervent tones of one who believes that it’s not only right and necessary to do your characters justice, but with the supreme confidence that I can.

How can I not live up to that? Even if it takes me twenty more years to make it so.

All you Wise Readers have to do is answer one question: did I do them justice? That, in the end, is what it all comes down to. That simple, and that bloody difficult.

Guess I’d best get to masticating.

What It's All About, Really, When You Get Right Down to It

Wanted: Wise Readers

jacob4 Comments

My darlings, I’m putting out a call to any and all who love Science Fiction and Fantasy: Dana wants you to keep her honest.

Dana needs Wise Readers.

A Wise Reader is not the author’s cheerleader, although there are times when it’s appropriate to don a short skirt and shake pom-poms. No, the Wise Reader is the author’s kick in the arse. They read the author’s first drafts, rip the author a new one (constructively, mind), and force the author to actually improve the damned story. They tell the author exactly what they liked, and why, but more importantly what fell and bloodied the story’s nose, and why. The author’s task in all of this is to just sit there and take the punishment. Then the author drags her bruised butt back to the story and improves it.

Think of it this way: remember all those books you’ve read where you’ve wanted to give the author a piece of your mind in no uncertain terms? Well, this is your chance.

An author needs Wise Readers for another reason: deadline pressure. And I’m in serious need of some deadline pressure here.

I’ve been a bad, bad fiction writer, and haven’t written any fiction in absolute ages. This stops now. As of yesterday, I’m taking one hour per day away from bashing teh stoopid and actually working on the stories that will rebuild my storytelling muscles. Got to build my stamina for that Magnum Opus that’s been demanding to be written since 2006, not to mention the Magnum Opi that have been patiently queued up since I was knee-high to a short beaver. And, like any athelete, I shall need coaches, personal trainers, and people forcing me to push through the pain.

If you want to be one of those mentioned on the Acknowledgements page as “Couldn’t have done this without…,” all you have to do is drop me a quick note at dhunterauthor at yahoo dot com. By August, you will be getting a story in your inbox to Wisely Read.

Muchos gracias in advance.

Wanted: Wise Readers

Your Opinion Please: Should We Have a Carnival?

jacob8 Comments

Update: Postdated to stay up here a spell.

PZ just threw out a call for volunteers to host the Tangled Bank. Got me to thinking: along with that, why not throw a carnival of our very own?

I’ve a few ideas:

Carnival of the Media Clowns – wherein we bash the wretched state of the modern American media.

Carnival of the Elitist Bastards – wherein we enjoy the novel fact that we use our brains for thinking and we know stuff.

Political Sideshows – wherein we unleash our rapier wit and scathing satire upon those politicians who have proven themselves no better than circus freaks.


I know a majority of you are excellent writers – I read your blogs, and you blow me away. I know a good number of you enjoy bashing politicians – otherwise, you wouldn’t be dropping by for Happy Hour Discurso. I know you’re smarter’n all get out, because your comments here are always insightful. And being that all of the above are true, I know you’re probably frustrated to death with the overwhelming stupidity of our nation’s mainstream media.

So what say you? Up for the challenge? Ready to create our own three-ring circus? Any of the ideas above catch your fancy? If so, let me know, and we’ll put together the greatest show on earth.

Or at least one that’ll pass for it given enough alcohol. The Cantina is open!

Your Opinion Please: Should We Have a Carnival?

Gone Splat

jacob3 Comments

I’ve gone splat against the wall, my darlings. Today’s been so full of outrageous political bullshit that I’m overwhelmed, and I’m too tired to digest it. Feels like that closet you’ve been chucking stuff into for decades, and you’ve just watched some program on freeing yourself of clutter. You troop off to that closet, fired with zeal, yank open the door, go “Oh my fucking god, where do I even begin?” and slam the door again. Only in my case, the stuff came out like a tsunami and smashed me into the drywall. Owies.

So I’m going to sit here, eat cheesecake, and ‘splain why that big red A is hanging about the place. You’ve been duly warned. If you’d rather indulge in some meatier fare, you could try Carpetbagger’s “Senator Hothead,” wherein the question is asked, “In the event of a crisis, do we want a leader known for his rage-induced tirades and unstable temperament?” Or skip over to the New York Times, which has finally noticed that Bush authorized “The Torture Sessions.” Glenn Greenwald has a “Major revelation: U.S. media deceitfully disseminates government propaganda,” which I skimmed for Happy Hour. He’s not as nice as I was. Secher Nbiw asks the “10 Debate Questions John McCain Will Never Be Asked.” And I can always recommend Digby’s Hullaballoo as a smorgasboard of outragey goodness. In fact, while I was pulling the link for that one, I saw Tristero’s taken to telling the young ‘uns that “Torture Is Always Immoral.” I couldn’t agree more.

Can’t get enough of Expelled-bashing? Try Thoughts in a Haystack. There’s a plethora of great stuff up just since yesterday. It’s the go-to place for a good, hearty laugh at IDiot’s expense. And Evolving Thoughts has a wonderful little fable that meshes beautifully with my own views, so of course I adore it.

Right, then. Don’t say I didn’t give you alternatives.

I’ve recently reconnected with some cherished friends from long ago. We haven’t talked in years. Last they knew of me, I was headed down to the Valley of Death the Sun to get myself a degree. I was officially agnostic, I talked a lot about the voices in my head (yes, my characters do chatter at me), I didn’t give two tugs on a dead dog’s dick for politics, I’d been leaning toward a strange amalgamation of Zen Buddhism/Taoism with a smattering of Odin, and I was officially agnostic.

Next thing they know, I’m up in Seattle with a big red atheist A splashed in the sidebar of my blog, bitching about politics and creationists.

My, how things have changed.

I am, indeed, officially an atheist now. It was a little hard to deny after I calculated my God Delusion Index and came up with a 5. I answered exactly one (1) (uno) question Yes:

5. Do you believe that a deeply contemplative act such as prayer or meditation can result in knowledge or understanding not attainable through ordinary thought?


I don’t believe, I know. Read too much about altered states of consciousness, I have. Studied Zen Buddhism and actually sort of understood some of it, didn’t I? Get into that “zone” where I’m not writing a story, I’m taking dictation, right? Even heard stories of scientists struggling with thorny physics problems and not getting the answer until they stop thinking and fall into a reverie. I’d go look up the particular story I have in mind, but I’m sitting here with some cheesecake, yammering at you lot, and I can’t remember the book it’s in, so it’ll have to wait.

But all of that’s human. And that’s what I realized. For all of my love for mythology, fairy tales, bizarre (to Westerners) philosophies, I’m not a believer in anything but the human imagination.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped looking for the divine. Stopped caring so much whether it existed out there or in here. I’ve become an odd creature, able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, but simultaneously knowing they’re nothing more than imagination. That doesn’t make it any less delightful. That doesn’t mean I love the stories less.

If anything, it’s more incredible. Actual existing supernatural beings would be a yawn. No more fantastic than the chair I’m sitting in. Bo-ring. Rather diminishes humanity in the bargain, if you ask me.

But imagination, now. That’s really something. That’s huge. That’s us. We did that. Incredible.

Let me just tell you a little story. There’s a point to it, I promise.

Many years ago, in Flagstaff, I took a smoke break and walked outside. I was busy lighting up and looking at the pine trees in the lot next to our building, soaking up the sun and thinking of absolutely nothing. And something caused me to turn around. Some sense of being watched. I look over, and I see the gray cinderblock walls through a mist of rain. And they’re shading into stone. And there’s a very young man with longish black hair sitting there, against the side of the building, huddled with his arms wrapped around his knees. The rain is dripping from his hair, and I’m still standing in brilliant, dry sunlight.

I just stand, and stare, shocked. I think I recognize him. I haven’t thought of him in years. “Nikki?” I finally say, and my voice is thin, full of the same sort of disbelief you’d feel upon turning around and seeing your travel-phobic friend somehow behind you right in the middle of Rome.

He looks up, slowly, and nods. Just once.

“I guess it’s time to write you, then.” It never matters how shocked I am. Snark is second nature.

He smiles at me, the rain streaming down his face, and then a squirrel dropped from one of the trees and gave me a jolt. I looked back, and he was gone. But the image never faded, and a character I thought had no place or purpose in my world was suddenly central.

Crazy, isn’t it? But things like that happen to authors. Other people see Jesus in their toast, we see our characters in random places, so real and immediate we could touch them, feel living flesh beneath our hand. It doesn’t matter that they come from so deep in our imaginations we’re not conscious of their residence there. To us, they’re real. And that’s why I understand people clinging to gods. To them, their god is real. To each our own.

That still does not give them the right to try to convert me. Doesn’t give them the right to pass judgement. Let’s be clear, there. I’m not going around preaching the advent of Nikki, the autistic wunderkind and trying to force him into the classroom, so I’d appreciate the same courtesy in return. People have a choice in what fiction they read, and it’s a very personal choice what fiction they choose to believe.

People may get the impression, reading the rants on this blog, that I have no patience for religion. And often, I don’t, because religion gets pretty obnoxious. It’s not the faith itself, so much, but the way people react to it. They push, I push back. It’s the way of things. That shouldn’t give the impression that I’m out to end religion. I don’t want to end it any more than I’d want some complete bastard to come take my characters away from me. Unless, of course, I start forcing their literal truth on folks.

Faith ha
s done some incredible good as well as incredible evil. I’d like to see less of the evil and more of the good, actually. We’ll talk more about that sometime, but for now, I just want to give you two words: Mother Theresa. Yes, I honor those whose faith leads them into a life of sacrifice and service for the poor and sick. I appreciate them, and I wouldn’t want to see them go, any more than I want to see biology crippled by misguided notions of piety.

I understand how comforting faith is. Another story, brief: on September 11th, 2001, when I’d just seen the video of the Towers crashing down, I remember standing with my hand on a cubicle wall feeling as if the entire world was ending. The future fell away in a gaping, black chasm. Some people reach for gods in those moments. I just heard the voice of one of my main characters, saying with calm conviction, “We survived. Dana. We survived this. Don’t worry.”

I know she’s not a voice from the heavens. I know she’s a voice from deep within me. And that doesn’t reduce the power of that moment one iota. It still resonates. I wouldn’t have made it through that day without the certainty her voice gave me. And she was right. We did survive.

Do you see what I’m saying, you religious folks? Science doesn’t threaten God. As long as you don’t cling to the need for your gods to be objectively real, science can’t touch them at all. Science hasn’t done shit to kick my characters out of my head. They’re still in there, taking up space, saying outrageous things at inopportune moments and making people who’ve never encountered a writer before reach for the nice white jacket with the long sleeves and fashionable buckles.

Science can never minimize the power of the human imagination. The only thing that can do that is insisting that everything in our imagination has to be really real. We place such severe limits on its power and scope when we do that. I did my characters the same discourtesy, once. I nearly smothered them. Then I became an atheist, and they can breathe again. I can feed them with all sorts of new ideas, because they’re not limited to the idea I had ten years ago. Heh, look at that, they’re evolving, and they’re better than ever.

So that’s it, in a not-so-tiny nutshell. The whole reason for that A. It’s there because I have a God Delusion Index of 5 and a universe in my head. It’s there because I refuse to limit my very human and extremely entertaining imagination. It’s there because I don’t need to be anything more than a human being evolved by chance, in a cosmos that’s revealed by science to be more awesome than anything I ever imagined.

It’s there because it sets me free to experience it all.

*Update: Really did go splat, there. Forgot the title. My, oh my.

Gone Splat

Go Forth and Encourage, My Darlings

jacob1 Comment

Brian Switek over at Laelaps is having a bad moment. My fellow writers, and interested readers, we need to troop over there and give him some love:

Given all the false-starts and struggles I’ve had as the concept of this book has evolved in my own head, it’s not unreasonable to ask why anyone needs another book about evolution. There’s presently a glut of books talking about evolution and why it is important, so what can I really hope to achieve? I have no idea if the finished product will be popular at all, but I think it’s important to try and express why I find evolution so fascinating.


I think so, too. Let’s all tell him so. There’s always room for one more, and Brian has the potential to be one of those science writers who fires up the next generation of evolutionary biologists. Don’t let him forget that.

Go Forth and Encourage, My Darlings